After grinding my way through to a doctorate, there are still only about a half-dozen journals that I can pick up and expect to really understand the significance of a randomly-selected article, and maybe another twenty journals which typically have at least one interesting article per issue. They all involve a narrow range of topics.
Typically, I find that Science and Nature are decent for getting some basic information about fields outside my speciality. Scientific American and such can also be fun, but they are quite simplified.
In any case, Whole Foods margins will be coming down, as a number of competitors are lining up to force them to compete. They will either race to the bottom or lose market share. This is not a bad thing.
Unfortunately, science via the media is almost worthless, and there is a pretty broad consensus around here from what I can tell. It is even worse when politics are involved. Here is my reasoning as to why.
1: Scientists who work in a particular field are self-selected to work in that field. Of course a cancer researcher thinks fighting cancer is important, or a global warming researcher thinks protecting the environment is important. This is not meant to attack these people, but I hope that you realize that one should take account of this when listening to their opinions. The result of this is one layer of hype for their research.
2. The second layer of hype is funding. If you want money to cure cancer, save the planet, or build better Legos, well, the first step is to scream bloody murder about how big the problem is and how wonderful your solution is. Like it or not, but scientists have every reason to hype their research - and as a research scientist myself, I can assure you that this is the way things really happen. This is a second layer of hype.
3: Then we get to the media, which receives this already-double-hyped information from the scientists. Well, what is the media's job? Selling information...and we all know their basic strategy is....hype!. So the "science" the average Joe reads in the newspaper is now triple-hyped.
4: Finally, we get to the big issue - politics. Most politicians get their information not directly from scientists, but from various media sources, lobby groups, and think tanks. But as noted, this information is already triple-hyped. Do you want to guess what the politician does? He/she then selects the information that best backs his or her position, and then hypes it.
By the time your favorite politician spews anything related to "science", you can be rest assured that it has been hyped so many times that it now bears no resemblance to anything approximating fact, and should be duly ignored. Before you start finger pointing, please get over the fact that both parties do it and are equally as bad (research anything related to Republicans vs Global Warming, or Democrats vs genetics/race/sex for all the anti-science details).
to wrong decisions. But the market is even good at dealing with the minimization of that issue. For example, the people making these decisions were selected to do so precisely because they have huge amounts of information about the subject, particularly compared to the average/. type. Maybe they will be wrong, but they are on the whole less likely to be wrong than you or I. Personal tastes influence decisions, and the best way to minimize this is to have group input, which I expect is going on in this case. A corporation who left major decisions to the whims of one person would be out of business pretty quickly.
However, this is tangential to my original point, which is that when a company possesses useful technology, it is to its economic benefit to release it, not "hide" it to protect its other sales. If the new product is truly better, they will make more money from selling the new product than they will lose from declining sales of the previous product.
even it very gut-reaction type experiments. For example, if I drop a cup of hot coffee, and you are standing next to me, you are more likely to catch it if you think the cup is valuable. No time to think, but your economic reasoning is spot on. Even rats have been shown to obey the laws of supply and demand. Yes, there are demonstrations of irrationable behavior but they tend to be minor and exist in rather unusual circumstances - not in long-term strategic thinking of groups of professional business planners.
Ultimately, you are simply trying to claim that because the model isn't perfect (what model is?), that you can ignore the results if they contradict your beliefs. Of course, those who deny global warming use the same logic. Heck, you could even deny the laws of gravity.
If you have a specific theoretical model as to why Apple and Motorola executives would not be acting in their own long-term interests in such a scenario, we could have an interesting dicussion. However, simply pointing out "the model ain't perfect" is meaningless unless you have a suggestion to why its imperfections matter in this circumstance.
Didn't we all learn that it is never a winning strategy for companies to hide beneficial technology? For example, one often hears conspiracy theories that GM could make a car that gets a zillion MPG, but big oil pays them to keep it in the dark. About three minutes of economics refutes this, by demonstrating that GM could make more selling the advanced cars than big oil would be willing to pay.
The same holds true for the iPod phone. Whatever the reason for its lack of certain features, it is clearly not to protect other companies, or even other divisions within Apple. If these features could be included at a competitive price, Apple would make more money by including them than it would lose elsewhere. Despite the looney theories, any MBA and Apple executive would know this.
First, I would say that the total effect is marginal, which is why I used the word "roughly". Two people are approximately twice as happy as one. Maybe this rough linearity breaks down in the extremes (being the only person is pretty boring, being a person in a place crowded to the point of starvation is obviously bad), but I do not think we are anywhere near either end.
There is, of course, arguments as to why adding an additional person slightly decreases everyone else's happiness (competition for space and resources). However, I doubt the costs to others offset the gain of the new person. On the other hand, one can argue that an additional person increases other people's happiness by producing new products, new information, new technology new entertainment, etc. My best estimation is that these two effects either roughly cancel, or the latter wins (at least in the first world). Most people produce more than they consume.
Either way, I would argue the net effect is small, and that six billion people are roughly three times as happy as two billion people.
I strongly believe that it is important for us to replace ourselves with children who are productive, and unfortunately, while the population is growing, the growth is concentrated among the least productive people. We need to find ways to discourage population growth in places that cannot sustain it, while doing the opposite in the first world, which is already tetering on the edge of population decline.
By reducing the population by two thirds, you roughly reduce human happiness by two thirds. I don't think this is a good solution at all.
We should be targeting the largest human population that our technology can sustain, which is even now six billion or more and will only increase with time.
Your "solution" reminds me of the dictator's solution to all crime - just imprison everyone!
than the average American. I took a fitness test in Kyoto once and they had the average height at just under 5'10" (177cm), which is a bit shorter than the average American male. The test was clearly normed for Japanese (I got annihilated on the flexibility test, and there is no way the average caucasian man can reach 4 inches past his toes!).
The racial differences in IQ are a whole other matter. Very policitally charged, unfortunately, which makes them difficult to talk about. Unfortunately, the evidence that at least some of the difference may actually be genetic is fairly strong. I dislike the fact that we cannot talk about this openly, but that is simply a reality in today's political climate.
I haven't touched one in years, and I still catch myself humming the most random Nintendo tunes.
I don't know which is worse - still being able to hum the tune during the "Game Over" screen from Super Mario Brothers 2, or still knowing that the tune is from SMB2.
Someone needs to invent a miracle pill that clears all this garbage out of our brains, so we can work on a cure for cancer or something else important with the newly-freed space.
are highly correlated, and from what I have read, both are strongly correlated with fewer children and delayed childbearing.
Saying "smart people are not having enough children" and "rich people are not having enough children" are almost identical statements, and equally true.
not IQ post-normalization, which would make no sense in this context.
In any case, the effect that you are referring to (called the Flynn effect) where IQ generally rises over time, has recently been shown to have come to a virtual halt in the first world. It was primarily an effect of the worst scores getting better, probably due to an increase in basic education and childhood nutrition.
I would say our print media is about the same, the internet is by its very nature the same, and that our TV media is the wildest and most colorful when it comes to politics (though we are quite prudish about violence, and even more so about sex).
On the whole, we are all in the same ballpark, however.
Clearly, though, the freedom of the press is greater in the first world than in many less-developed countries, and definitely China.
I think a better attack on China in this instance is to start calling all their blocking of our media a trade violation - you block our news, we block your cheap @$$ junk.
but the correlation between intelligence and wealth is around.7. The correlation between parents' and a child's intelligence is about the same. Therefore, you should see a quite robust correlation between the wealth and intelligence - even before you consider the positive effects on learning that a good family would typically provide.
Is there not a major assumption being made here - that smart people are wealthier than poor people?
The correlation between intelligence and wealth is very high. Of course, humans consist of too many variables for the correlation to be perfect.
"Wealth (and by implication survival in the modern world - although that is another questionable assumption) is far more a matter of luck and inheritance (wealth or status, not genes) than intelligence."
90% of millionaires are self-made and earned the money. Luck has little to do with it. Even in the cases of inheritance, which are rare, you would still find a correlation between wealth and intellgence, because whomever they inherited from was likely to be intelligent and also likely to be related.
In fact, I suspect that there are far more important qualities, relating to the ability to focus on specific activities or goals that are relevant to an individuals wealth generating ability.
No doubt there are other abilities, but I don't think any of them matter as much as intelligence.
Most jobs with good salaries nowadays require a good mind, not a pretty face or a strong back.
In any event, I would completely reject your implication that we kill off the poor because they are polluting the human gene pool.
I never said that. I specifically said that the lower classes are reproducing at approximately the rate consistent with zero population growth, which is fine. It is rich/educated/intelligent people who are not having enough children to replace themselves. We need polices that encourage them to have children, not policies that punish the poor for doing so. One idea that I like is to tie your Social Security payments to the productivity of your children. If half of your paycheck came directly from your kids (and from the kids' perspective, half your payment went to your parents), there would be much more incentive to middle and upper class families to have children, and much less dead-weight economic loss.
Do you want to raise taxes by 5% (of your total income, for life) to pay for this? If you want teachers to have the same amount of education as doctors, you will have to pay them accordingly.
All that, and there is little evidence that dumping more money in schools makes much of a difference in the first place.
As someone who has sat through a number of teacher education courses, I can't possibly imagine what years of enduring such BS would accomplish except to drive almost every teacher out of the profession before they taught anyone anything.
You had better ask all those tens of millions that starved just a couple of generations ago, and the hundreds of millions that are still impoverished today.
You can still see the effects of WWII in Japan tody, where I live. People born in that era are far shorter than people younger than them - a clear sign of poor nutrition. Young Japanese are close to the same height as Americans, as far as I can tell.
Also, the Flynn effect seems to be leveling off in advanced countries, which is perfectly consistent with the nutrition model, for reasons you noted.
You are absolutely right...smart people are not breeding enough in the first world. Birthrates are now below replacement levels in every advanced country, with the US being in the least-bad position. In other nations, such as Japan, the lack of children is becoming a serious political issue. It will eventually be a problem in the US as well.
In order to sustain our population (which seems a reasonable target) we need to have about 2.1 children per woman. In the US, lower class people are doing just about that. It is the top half of the income distribution that is failing to do its duty by replacing itself in the next generation.
I have seen some estimates that we could lose as much as one point of IQ per generation due to differential numbers of children and mother's age at birth - a pretty scary thought if you ask me.
Unless some amazing new technology comes to save the day, in the next few years we are seriously going to have to consider more government manipulation of birthrates, or our society and culture could disappear.
The government merely sorts out lots of competing private interests. The "public" is only and idea and therefore cannot have interests. Do people from both sides of the aisles get laws passed that unfairly benefit them? Of course. The simplest way to combat this is to simplify the laws to the point where they can be transparent, particularly tax laws. Every four years, we have this massive debate about taxes, and the honest answer is that it is pointless. There can be no possible rational argument to lower or raise Bob's taxes until we have half of a clue as to how much Bob actually pays. Our system is so complicated that this question simply cannot be answered. Hence, the debate is meaningless. There is simply no way to know if people making $200,000 each year or $20,000 each year are paying their fair share, as we cannot tell how much they are paying in the first place. One of the better ways to end corporate subsidies is to end the corporate tax and raise capital gains tax on the investors to replace it. Most corporate "subsidies" are tax breaks, not hand-outs. If they don't pay any tax at that level, there is nothing to cut.
Our courts need massive reform. First, I would start with the simple principle that juries should not decide the reward in any case involving more than a million dollars. In reality, they don't anyway so why pretend? The reason is that below a million dollars, we are talking about something within the realm of human experience. You do not need to be an accountant or mathematician to know what $100,000 is. However, when we are talking about hundreds of millions and billions, these things are abstract. You cannot do this by feel, you must do it by reason, and layman juries have proven again and again that they do not have this power. The result are rewards that are all over the place, and often orders-of-magnitude out of whack.
A corporation can hire all the mercs it wants - they can't force me to do anything.
I have no idea where you get the lunatic theory that corporations are about to overthrow the government. Hell, in the current legal system, being a corp is a major handicap. Need proof? Watch Merck get annihilated in the next few years, mostly based on bad reasoning and worse science, as decided by juries with an average IQ of about 90 (smart people are not allowed on juries in liability suits).
It is a little under $5.00/gal here in Kyoto, Japan, and this is one of the most expensive places in the world. Back when gas was uber-cheap in the states we were paying 1/3 of what a European or Japanese was paying. Remember, however, that their taxes do not scale with the price of gas.
I sure don't want to live here permanently or attempt to raise a family here. I fail to see where I have been "bragging", or why you have such a hostile attitude. Half the people on earth speak a second language. Virtually all of my coworkers can speak English as well or better than I can speak Japanese, which means I am loosing to all of them on that count. Hardly something to brag about, nor anywhere near my highest levels of accomplishment. Heck, there is an 18-year-old American living in my complex who speaks better Japanese than I do. Also, I am a bit baffled as to why spending 10 years in a country is something to brag about. Even people dumb as rocks have done that countless times before.
I have studied five university level semesters and have lived in Japan for a total of six months (where language has not been my primary focus). I read about 800 kanji and write about half that. I understand about 40% of native Japanese that is not directed at me, and about 90% of that which is. I have been on a number of dates entirely in Japanese, can give and receive directions and instructions over the phone, and generally understand the point of technical discussions in my own field.
Obviously, this is a long process but I would say 1/3 is a fair estimate.
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After grinding my way through to a doctorate, there are still only about a half-dozen journals that I can pick up and expect to really understand the significance of a randomly-selected article, and maybe another twenty journals which typically have at least one interesting article per issue. They all involve a narrow range of topics.
Typically, I find that Science and Nature are decent for getting some basic information about fields outside my speciality. Scientific American and such can also be fun, but they are quite simplified.
and so would you...
In any case, Whole Foods margins will be coming down, as a number of competitors are lining up to force them to compete. They will either race to the bottom or lose market share. This is not a bad thing.
Unfortunately, science via the media is almost worthless, and there is a pretty broad consensus around here from what I can tell. It is even worse when politics are involved. Here is my reasoning as to why.
1: Scientists who work in a particular field are self-selected to work in that field. Of course a cancer researcher thinks fighting cancer is important, or a global warming researcher thinks protecting the environment is important. This is not meant to attack these people, but I hope that you realize that one should take account of this when listening to their opinions. The result of this is one layer of hype for their research.
2. The second layer of hype is funding. If you want money to cure cancer, save the planet, or build better Legos, well, the first step is to scream bloody murder about how big the problem is and how wonderful your solution is. Like it or not, but scientists have every reason to hype their research - and as a research scientist myself, I can assure you that this is the way things really happen. This is a second layer of hype.
3: Then we get to the media, which receives this already-double-hyped information from the scientists. Well, what is the media's job? Selling information...and we all know their basic strategy is....hype!. So the "science" the average Joe reads in the newspaper is now triple-hyped.
4: Finally, we get to the big issue - politics. Most politicians get their information not directly from scientists, but from various media sources, lobby groups, and think tanks. But as noted, this information is already triple-hyped. Do you want to guess what the politician does? He/she then selects the information that best backs his or her position, and then hypes it.
By the time your favorite politician spews anything related to "science", you can be rest assured that it has been hyped so many times that it now bears no resemblance to anything approximating fact, and should be duly ignored. Before you start finger pointing, please get over the fact that both parties do it and are equally as bad (research anything related to Republicans vs Global Warming, or Democrats vs genetics/race/sex for all the anti-science details).
to wrong decisions. But the market is even good at dealing with the minimization of that issue. For example, the people making these decisions were selected to do so precisely because they have huge amounts of information about the subject, particularly compared to the average /. type. Maybe they will be wrong, but they are on the whole less likely to be wrong than you or I. Personal tastes influence decisions, and the best way to minimize this is to have group input, which I expect is going on in this case. A corporation who left major decisions to the whims of one person would be out of business pretty quickly.
However, this is tangential to my original point, which is that when a company possesses useful technology, it is to its economic benefit to release it, not "hide" it to protect its other sales. If the new product is truly better, they will make more money from selling the new product than they will lose from declining sales of the previous product.
even it very gut-reaction type experiments. For example, if I drop a cup of hot coffee, and you are standing next to me, you are more likely to catch it if you think the cup is valuable. No time to think, but your economic reasoning is spot on. Even rats have been shown to obey the laws of supply and demand. Yes, there are demonstrations of irrationable behavior but they tend to be minor and exist in rather unusual circumstances - not in long-term strategic thinking of groups of professional business planners.
Ultimately, you are simply trying to claim that because the model isn't perfect (what model is?), that you can ignore the results if they contradict your beliefs. Of course, those who deny global warming use the same logic. Heck, you could even deny the laws of gravity.
If you have a specific theoretical model as to why Apple and Motorola executives would not be acting in their own long-term interests in such a scenario, we could have an interesting dicussion. However, simply pointing out "the model ain't perfect" is meaningless unless you have a suggestion to why its imperfections matter in this circumstance.
Didn't we all learn that it is never a winning strategy for companies to hide beneficial technology? For example, one often hears conspiracy theories that GM could make a car that gets a zillion MPG, but big oil pays them to keep it in the dark. About three minutes of economics refutes this, by demonstrating that GM could make more selling the advanced cars than big oil would be willing to pay.
The same holds true for the iPod phone. Whatever the reason for its lack of certain features, it is clearly not to protect other companies, or even other divisions within Apple. If these features could be included at a competitive price, Apple would make more money by including them than it would lose elsewhere. Despite the looney theories, any MBA and Apple executive would know this.
First, I would say that the total effect is marginal, which is why I used the word "roughly". Two people are approximately twice as happy as one. Maybe this rough linearity breaks down in the extremes (being the only person is pretty boring, being a person in a place crowded to the point of starvation is obviously bad), but I do not think we are anywhere near either end.
There is, of course, arguments as to why adding an additional person slightly decreases everyone else's happiness (competition for space and resources). However, I doubt the costs to others offset the gain of the new person. On the other hand, one can argue that an additional person increases other people's happiness by producing new products, new information, new technology new entertainment, etc. My best estimation is that these two effects either roughly cancel, or the latter wins (at least in the first world). Most people produce more than they consume.
Either way, I would argue the net effect is small, and that six billion people are roughly three times as happy as two billion people.
I strongly believe that it is important for us to replace ourselves with children who are productive, and unfortunately, while the population is growing, the growth is concentrated among the least productive people. We need to find ways to discourage population growth in places that cannot sustain it, while doing the opposite in the first world, which is already tetering on the edge of population decline.
By reducing the population by two thirds, you roughly reduce human happiness by two thirds. I don't think this is a good solution at all.
We should be targeting the largest human population that our technology can sustain, which is even now six billion or more and will only increase with time.
Your "solution" reminds me of the dictator's solution to all crime - just imprison everyone!
than the average American. I took a fitness test in Kyoto once and they had the average height at just under 5'10" (177cm), which is a bit shorter than the average American male. The test was clearly normed for Japanese (I got annihilated on the flexibility test, and there is no way the average caucasian man can reach 4 inches past his toes!).
The racial differences in IQ are a whole other matter. Very policitally charged, unfortunately, which makes them difficult to talk about. Unfortunately, the evidence that at least some of the difference may actually be genetic is fairly strong. I dislike the fact that we cannot talk about this openly, but that is simply a reality in today's political climate.
I haven't touched one in years, and I still catch myself humming the most random Nintendo tunes.
I don't know which is worse - still being able to hum the tune during the "Game Over" screen from Super Mario Brothers 2, or still knowing that the tune is from SMB2.
Someone needs to invent a miracle pill that clears all this garbage out of our brains, so we can work on a cure for cancer or something else important with the newly-freed space.
are highly correlated, and from what I have read, both are strongly correlated with fewer children and delayed childbearing.
Saying "smart people are not having enough children" and "rich people are not having enough children" are almost identical statements, and equally true.
not IQ post-normalization, which would make no sense in this context.
In any case, the effect that you are referring to (called the Flynn effect) where IQ generally rises over time, has recently been shown to have come to a virtual halt in the first world. It was primarily an effect of the worst scores getting better, probably due to an increase in basic education and childhood nutrition.
I would say our print media is about the same, the internet is by its very nature the same, and that our TV media is the wildest and most colorful when it comes to politics (though we are quite prudish about violence, and even more so about sex).
On the whole, we are all in the same ballpark, however.
Clearly, though, the freedom of the press is greater in the first world than in many less-developed countries, and definitely China.
I think a better attack on China in this instance is to start calling all their blocking of our media a trade violation - you block our news, we block your cheap @$$ junk.
but the correlation between intelligence and wealth is around .7. The correlation between parents' and a child's intelligence is about the same. Therefore, you should see a quite robust correlation between the wealth and intelligence - even before you consider the positive effects on learning that a good family would typically provide.
Is there not a major assumption being made here - that smart people are wealthier than poor people? The correlation between intelligence and wealth is very high. Of course, humans consist of too many variables for the correlation to be perfect. "Wealth (and by implication survival in the modern world - although that is another questionable assumption) is far more a matter of luck and inheritance (wealth or status, not genes) than intelligence." 90% of millionaires are self-made and earned the money. Luck has little to do with it. Even in the cases of inheritance, which are rare, you would still find a correlation between wealth and intellgence, because whomever they inherited from was likely to be intelligent and also likely to be related. In fact, I suspect that there are far more important qualities, relating to the ability to focus on specific activities or goals that are relevant to an individuals wealth generating ability. No doubt there are other abilities, but I don't think any of them matter as much as intelligence. Most jobs with good salaries nowadays require a good mind, not a pretty face or a strong back. In any event, I would completely reject your implication that we kill off the poor because they are polluting the human gene pool. I never said that. I specifically said that the lower classes are reproducing at approximately the rate consistent with zero population growth, which is fine. It is rich/educated/intelligent people who are not having enough children to replace themselves. We need polices that encourage them to have children, not policies that punish the poor for doing so. One idea that I like is to tie your Social Security payments to the productivity of your children. If half of your paycheck came directly from your kids (and from the kids' perspective, half your payment went to your parents), there would be much more incentive to middle and upper class families to have children, and much less dead-weight economic loss.
Do you want to raise taxes by 5% (of your total income, for life) to pay for this? If you want teachers to have the same amount of education as doctors, you will have to pay them accordingly.
All that, and there is little evidence that dumping more money in schools makes much of a difference in the first place.
As someone who has sat through a number of teacher education courses, I can't possibly imagine what years of enduring such BS would accomplish except to drive almost every teacher out of the profession before they taught anyone anything.
intelligence and income. What are you talking about?
time?
You had better ask all those tens of millions that starved just a couple of generations ago, and the hundreds of millions that are still impoverished today.
You can still see the effects of WWII in Japan tody, where I live. People born in that era are far shorter than people younger than them - a clear sign of poor nutrition. Young Japanese are close to the same height as Americans, as far as I can tell.
Also, the Flynn effect seems to be leveling off in advanced countries, which is perfectly consistent with the nutrition model, for reasons you noted.
You are absolutely right...smart people are not breeding enough in the first world. Birthrates are now below replacement levels in every advanced country, with the US being in the least-bad position. In other nations, such as Japan, the lack of children is becoming a serious political issue. It will eventually be a problem in the US as well.
In order to sustain our population (which seems a reasonable target) we need to have about 2.1 children per woman. In the US, lower class people are doing just about that. It is the top half of the income distribution that is failing to do its duty by replacing itself in the next generation.
I have seen some estimates that we could lose as much as one point of IQ per generation due to differential numbers of children and mother's age at birth - a pretty scary thought if you ask me.
Unless some amazing new technology comes to save the day, in the next few years we are seriously going to have to consider more government manipulation of birthrates, or our society and culture could disappear.
The government merely sorts out lots of competing private interests. The "public" is only and idea and therefore cannot have interests. Do people from both sides of the aisles get laws passed that unfairly benefit them? Of course. The simplest way to combat this is to simplify the laws to the point where they can be transparent, particularly tax laws. Every four years, we have this massive debate about taxes, and the honest answer is that it is pointless. There can be no possible rational argument to lower or raise Bob's taxes until we have half of a clue as to how much Bob actually pays. Our system is so complicated that this question simply cannot be answered. Hence, the debate is meaningless. There is simply no way to know if people making $200,000 each year or $20,000 each year are paying their fair share, as we cannot tell how much they are paying in the first place. One of the better ways to end corporate subsidies is to end the corporate tax and raise capital gains tax on the investors to replace it. Most corporate "subsidies" are tax breaks, not hand-outs. If they don't pay any tax at that level, there is nothing to cut. Our courts need massive reform. First, I would start with the simple principle that juries should not decide the reward in any case involving more than a million dollars. In reality, they don't anyway so why pretend? The reason is that below a million dollars, we are talking about something within the realm of human experience. You do not need to be an accountant or mathematician to know what $100,000 is. However, when we are talking about hundreds of millions and billions, these things are abstract. You cannot do this by feel, you must do it by reason, and layman juries have proven again and again that they do not have this power. The result are rewards that are all over the place, and often orders-of-magnitude out of whack.
The law.
A corporation can hire all the mercs it wants - they can't force me to do anything.
I have no idea where you get the lunatic theory that corporations are about to overthrow the government. Hell, in the current legal system, being a corp is a major handicap. Need proof? Watch Merck get annihilated in the next few years, mostly based on bad reasoning and worse science, as decided by juries with an average IQ of about 90 (smart people are not allowed on juries in liability suits).
It is a little under $5.00/gal here in Kyoto, Japan, and this is one of the most expensive places in the world. Back when gas was uber-cheap in the states we were paying 1/3 of what a European or Japanese was paying. Remember, however, that their taxes do not scale with the price of gas.
private company forces me to do anything against my will.
The government does this every day.
Corporations have no power over me unless I give it to them - and that is a profound and staggering difference which you are ignoring.
I sure don't want to live here permanently or attempt to raise a family here. I fail to see where I have been "bragging", or why you have such a hostile attitude. Half the people on earth speak a second language. Virtually all of my coworkers can speak English as well or better than I can speak Japanese, which means I am loosing to all of them on that count. Hardly something to brag about, nor anywhere near my highest levels of accomplishment. Heck, there is an 18-year-old American living in my complex who speaks better Japanese than I do. Also, I am a bit baffled as to why spending 10 years in a country is something to brag about. Even people dumb as rocks have done that countless times before.
I have studied five university level semesters and have lived in Japan for a total of six months (where language has not been my primary focus). I read about 800 kanji and write about half that. I understand about 40% of native Japanese that is not directed at me, and about 90% of that which is. I have been on a number of dates entirely in Japanese, can give and receive directions and instructions over the phone, and generally understand the point of technical discussions in my own field.
Obviously, this is a long process but I would say 1/3 is a fair estimate.